Peter Greenaway S Postmodern Poststructuralist Cinema

Since the 1960s, British multi-media artist Peter Greenaway has shocked and intrigued audiences with his avant-garde approach to filmmaking and other artistic ventures. From early experimental films to provocative features, Greenaway has deployed strategies associated with structuralist cinema, only to challenge or critique the very limits of that cinema and of film in general. In this collection of essays, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore various postmodern and poststructuralist aspects of Greenaway's films, starting with his early shorts and delving into his feature-length works, including The Draughtman's Contract, The Belly of an Architect, A Zed and Two Noughts, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The Baby of M%con, and The Pillow Book. Other artistic productions, including his paintings and installations are also discussed. These essays examine the filmmaker's position within British and avant-garde cinema and his interest in constructing and deconstructing representational systems. In the years since the first edition of this book, Greenaway has enjoyed continued success in creating hybridized media projects for the stage and screen, as evidenced by additional essays for this revised edition. A new chapter addresses how Dutch political events and Dutch art have been crucial in shaping Greenaway's aesthetic, focusing on The Draughtsman's Contract, the 1991 opera Writing to Vermeer, and Nightwatching, the audio-visual installation and 2007 film of the same name, which were inspired by Rembrandt's Night Watch. Also new to this collection is an essay that examines Greenaway's most ambitious endeavor to date, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, which exists as four feature films, multiple websites, an online game, several books and installations, and a number of theatrical events. Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema, Revised Edition explores the cultural, historical, and philosophical implications of this hybrid artist whose paintings, drawings, exhibitions, installations, and operatic productions are an intrinsic part of his work in film. This collection of diverse essays, which includes two texts by Greenaway, two interviews with the director, and a revised filmography, will interest students, teachers, critics and lovers of both postmodern art and cinema.

Alemany-Galway (media studies, Massey University, New Zealand) engages with a trend in Canadian cinema that speaks for those who are marginalized by society. She develops a rationale for a postmodern film theory to explore this trend and then focuses closely on four films: Jesus of Montreal, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Family Viewing, Life Classes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book applies ecolinguistics and psychoanalysis to explore how films fictionalising environmental disasters provide spectacular warnings against the dangers of environmental apocalypse, while highlighting that even these apparently environmentally friendly films can still facilitate problematic real-world changes in how people treat the environment. Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis argues that these films exploit cinema’s inherent Cartesian grammar to construct texts in which not only small groups of protagonist survivors, but also vicarious spectators, pleasurably transcend the fictionalised destruction. The ideological nature of the ‘lifeboats’ on which these survivors escape, moreover, is accompanied by additional elements that constitute contemporary Cartesian subjectivity, such as class and gender binaries, restored nuclear families, individual as opposed to social responsibilities for disasters, and so on. The book conducts extensive analyses of these processes, before considering alternative forms of filmmaking that might avoid the dangers of this existing form of storytelling. The book’s new ecosophy and film theory establishes that Cartesian subjectivity is an environmentally destructive ‘symptom’ that everyday linguistic activities like watching films reinforce. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of film studies, literary studies (specifically ecocriticism), cultural studies, ecolinguistics, and ecosophy.

Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics is a comprehensive collection devoted to the new field of research called 'intermedialities.' The concept of intermedialities stresses the necessity of situating philosophical and political debates on social relations in the divergent contexts of media theories, avant-garde artistic practices, continental philosophy, feminism, and political theory. The 'intermedial' approach to social relations does not focus on the shared identity but instead on the epistemological, ethical, and political status of inter (being-in-between). At stake here are the political analyses of new modes of being in common that transcend national boundaries, the critique of the new forms of domination that accompany them, and the search for new emancipatory possibilities. Opening a new approach to social relations, intermedialities investigates not only engagements between already constituted positions but even more the interval, antagonism, and differences that form and decenter these positions. Consequently, in opposition to the resurgence of cultural and ethnic particularisms and to the leveling of difference produced by globalization, the political and ethical analysis of the 'in-between' enables a conception of community based on difference, exposure, and interaction with others rather than on an identification with a shared identity. Investigations of 'in-betweenness,' both as medium specific and between heterogeneous 'sites' of inquiry, range here from philosophical conceptuality to artistic practices, from the political circulation of money and power to the operation of new technologies. They inevitably invoke the crucial role of embodiment in creative thought and collective acting. As a mediating instance between the psyche and society, matter and spirit, nature and culture, and biology and technology, the body is another interval forming and informed by socio-linguistic relations. As these complex intersections between media, materiality, art, and the philosophy and politics of the in-between suggest, the project of intermedialities provides new ways of rethinking relations among arts, politics, and science.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From the proto-cinematic sequencing of animal motion in the nineteenth century to the ubiquity of animal videos online, the histories of animal life and the moving image are enigmatically interlocked. Animal Life and the Moving Image is the first collection of essays to offer a sustained focus on the relations between screen cultures and non-human animals. The volume brings together some of the most important and influential writers working on the non-human animal's significance for cultures and theories of the moving image. It offers innovative analyses of the representation of animals across a wide range of documentary, fiction, mainstream and avant-garde practices, from early cinema to contemporary user-generated media. Individual chapters consider King Kong, The Birds, The Misfits, The Cove, Grizzly Man and Microcosmos, the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Bresson, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Greenaway, Carolee Schneemann and Isabella Rossellini, and YouTube stars Christian the lion and Maru the cat.

This collection models an approach to Shakespeare and cinema that is concerned with the other side of Shakespeare's Hollywood celebrity, taking the reader on a practical and theoretical tour through important, non-mainstream films and the oppositional messages they convey. The collection includes essays on early silent adaptations of 'Hamlet', Greenway's 'Prospero's Books', Godard's 'King Lear', Hall's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', Taymor's 'Titus', Polanski's 'Macbeth', Welles 'Chimes at Midnight', and Van Sant's 'My Own Private Idaho'.